Actually Alhadis if I could just make a small correction about that. That word, "porrada" has no direct translation to English, it means something like the user said but not exactly in that sense. For instance we say in Portuguese:

So I guess that the translation shouldn't be "hit" because there's little correlation with a direct translation like that. It could read something like "translates as being hit/fighting or hitting/fighting someone, the band explains the term as hard-hitting music". Something like that would be much more accurate. ENG vs PT isn't always a peach!

Yeah, that's what I meant. There's no specific translation to English. It's one of those words that depends on the context and on the verb being used with it, because it acquires a different meaning depending on how it's used. Given the user's input on the report I'd say it's related to "hard-hitting music", which in PT-PT we would say as "malha". In fact: porrada (PT-BR) = malha (PT-PT), in the sense that something is kick ass.

I think that the best thing is to leave a note saying there's no literal translation of the word, but that the band's intention was the one pointed by the user.

PS: No, there's no verb like that.

PS2: This is a somewhat similar case in terms of untranslatable words.

Shouldn't the rule be something more like "Do it as the band does"? Many bands mispell things deliberately, Usually names of bands but sometimes also songs. This is no different than when bands use odd grammer. Somebands don't use spaces, such as "anotherdrinkingsong" by Skyclad. Many Japanese bands capitalize their hole name's. Glam Metal artist use corny mispellings like "nite" for "night" & "crazee" for "crazy." Similarly, Extreme Metal bands make badass mispellings like "Deth" & "Mercyful." Shouldn't we just spell them as the bands spell themselves?

Depends.Spelling of band names and album titles - should stay the way a band does it.Capitalization of band names and album titles - will be changed to our standards. (personally I wouldn't mind writing the last letter of a band name with a capital letter if the band does so in all they logos, websites etc. but it also has some advantages to have one consistent capitalization system)Spelling and capitalization of lyrics - I normally only correct the most obvious typos, and sometimes not even these. But that's something everyone handles differenty. The guideline I'd suggest to follow is, if you can tell that it's a typo and not written wrong intentionally it's okay to correct it.

Google is of no help--unless I could speak Latvian, I imagine. I presume being a Latin-based language, that maybe only the first word of a title and proper nouns should be uppercase, but I won't make any edits without knowing for certain. Most of the Latvian bands on here write their titles in English and of the few who use Latvian, most have every word capitalized--here'safewexceptions which further makes me believe Latvian is like most other languages.

Google is of no help--unless I could speak Latvian, I imagine. I presume being a Latin-based language, that maybe only the first word of a title and proper nouns should be uppercase, but I won't make any edits without knowing for certain. Most of the Latvian bands on here write their titles in English and of the few who use Latvian, most have every word capitalized--here'safewexceptions which further makes me believe Latvian is like most other languages.

Here's a question.What's with the ellipsis as a single character (U+2026 - as used in Vader's Welcome to the Morbid Reich) instead of three separate dots consecutively? Is the former preferred and why?

...Wait, what? .__. I had a major brain fart there, I sort of mentally assumed I was talking about Musicbrainz when I wrote that. Yeah, we should definitely be using MB's anyways, they seem much more specific and comprehensive. Here you go, Morri:

Here's a question.What's with the ellipsis as a single character (U+2026 - as used in Vader's Welcome to the Morbid Reich) instead of three separate dots consecutively? Is the former preferred and why?

Remove the ellipsis character whenever it's encountered. Chances are it's there because it was copy+pasted directly from a page that uses "fancy" characters (directional quotes, en/em-hyphens, etc). You know, the sort of characters encountered when writing in Microsoft Word or what-have-you.

These characters are indeed very non-standard. I even wrote a script to automatically clear them from every text field on a page.

javascript:void(function(){if(!Array.prototype.map){Array.prototype.map=function(a,b){if(this==null)throw new TypeError(" this is null or not defined");if(typeof a!=="function")throw new TypeError(a+" is not a function");var O=Object(this);var c=O.length>>>0;var T=b?b:undefined;var A=new Array(c);var k=0;while(k<c){var d,mappedValue;if(k in O){d=O[k];mappedValue=a.call(T,d,k,O);A[k]=mappedValue}k++}return A}}var r=/\s+$/;var e,i,f=document.forms;for(var x=0;x<f.length;++x){e=f[x].elements;for(y=0;y<e.length;y++){i=e[y];if("text"==i.type||"textarea"==i.type)i.value=i.value.replace(/&#(\d+);/gmi,function(s,v){return String.fromCharCode(v)}).replace(/&#x([a-fA-F\d]+);/gmi,function(s,v){return String.fromCharCode(parseInt(v,16))}).replace(/[\u201C\u201D]/gmi,'"').replace(/[`´\u2018\u2019]/gmi,"'").replace(/[\u2010-\u2015]/gmi,"-").replace(/('')/gmi,'"').replace(/\u2026/gmi,"...").split("\n").map(function(a){return a.replace(r,"")}).join("\n").replace(r,"")}}}());

Copy this code and add a new bookmark in your browser's bookmarks bar. To use it, open the page in a tab and press the bookmark button. The script will run through every text entry on a page and do the following:

Collapse ''double single quotes'' into "single double quotes"

Convert ` into ' (read: `` will also be collapsed into a ", as per the above line)

Turn “” and ‘’ into "" and '', respectively

Turn … into ...

Word-style hyphens (‐ ‑ ‒ – —) will be converted to regular hyphens

Turn HTML entities like &gt; into > or whatever (NOTE: There was a huge purge of HTML character entities done last year, so these shouldn't be encountered on the site anywhere)

Here's a question.What's with the ellipsis as a single character (U+2026 - as used in Vader's Welcome to the Morbid Reich) instead of three separate dots consecutively? Is the former preferred and why?

That seems very non-standard to me. Three separate dots is preferred.

Alhadis wrote:

Remove the ellipsis character whenever it's encountered. Chances are it's there because it was copy+pasted directly from a page that uses "fancy" characters (directional quotes, en/em-hyphens, etc). You know, the sort of characters encountered when writing in Microsoft Word or what-have-you.

The point is that someone purposely changed these on the 'Welcome to the Morbid Reich' page. Is this point whoring or what?

P.S. I'm not talking about Azmodes' last edit from today (as seen from the update history) - it used to be three dots, then someone changed it to that Unicode char, then Azmodes fixed it. That's what I saw.

Huh, this is weird. I could've sworn that Portuguese rules should basically follow those of English, unlike the other Romance languages, but MusicBrainz says otherwise. (I'm almost positive that RateYourMusic's language wiki [which has since been deleted] said so.) So ...? androdion, somebody, assistance?

A side note: apparently names of months are capitalized in Portugal but not in Brazil. So if we adopt MB's guidelines, when updating Portuguese and Brazilian bands, use the rule based upon the bands' country of origin?

A side note: apparently names of months are capitalized in Portugal but not in Brazil. So if we adopt MB's guidelines, when updating Portuguese and Brazilian bands, use the rule based upon the bands' country of origin?

Brazilian band:Está nevando em dezembro.

Portuguese band:Está nevando em Dezembro.

?

Out of curiosity, when would that ever become relevant? The foundation date of bands (or anything else in the additional notes, for that matter) is supposed to be in English regardless of what country the band are from.

_________________

Wilytank wrote:

Aeosphorus wrote:

there are post-black metal bands such as ...Sunn O.

When did we start calling Sunn O))) black metal and how soon can we stop?

This is kind of tricky, let me explain why. We have a thing called CPLP which is basically a way to install conventions between the different countries that use Portuguese as their primary language. It's between these countries that orthographic agreements are made and applied. We here in Portugal have been living by the 1990 one until recently, and under that agreement there are substantial differences in the language between different countries. Brazil and Portugal for instance have a lot of different stuff. But now we are already using a new orthographic agreement that is much broader than the one preceding it. Basically it's meant to be some sort of unifying linguistic diploma between the countries composing the CPLP, i.e. a way to have the Portuguese language a bit more similar in its execution between the different countries of CPLP. This in turn means that a lot of the stuff that was different between, for instance PT-PT and PT-BR, now aren't as such. That "december" example is such a case.

I've found this converser, which basically corrects the orthography to the new agreement, and you can input text in either PT-PT or PT-BR and have it converted to the correct spelling under the new orthographic agreement.

There are things though that aren't changed by an orthographic agreement, like structuring a sentence, and in PT-PT we don't say "está nevando no mês..." but solely "neva no mês...", as the verb already indicates the action in the correct verbal time.

Fuck me if I know! It's all too much really. This crap keeps changing every once in a while you know?! Officially there's only two orthographic agreements (the 1990 and the new one), but in the meantime we had what could be described as "local changes" done a few times. And back and forth. You could say I got lost in translation.

As far as I know though titles are equal, be it the title of a book/song/album. So the capitalization rules are the same to any of those.

-The first element of a street name or of a saint can be written either way. Same is valid for a course. E.g. "avenida da Liberdade/Avenida da Liberdade, são João/São João", "aula de português/aula de Português"

Still can't answer all your questions guys, and apparently this is way more fucked up than I thought it was. Apparently the orthographic agreement that is now instituted is the one from... 1990... That one surpasses the one from 1945 (wtf?!) and is now under the 6 year adaptation period since May 13 2009. But... it had already been promulgated by the government back in 1991! Plus it had the said changes (modifying protocols as they were dubbed) in 2000 and 2004.

I think a lot of that is because we have so many different ways of pronouncing each letter, while most languages have only one or two. Like in Spanish, the letter A is always pronounced "ah"; in English, we have "ah", "aa" (short vowel length), "ay" (long vowel length), etc. But on the other hand, English has simple verb forms, while with the Romance languages, the verb changes depending on the subject. So the "difficulty" of each language is to a degree how one perceives it to be.

I've studied English and French, my sister is a German teacher, and I'm a moderator of the Spanish sub-forum of a game's official support forum. All of them (Spanish maybe not as much) are simpler than Portuguese. A funny thing about the Portuguese language is that due to the high level of illiteracy (which is still around 10% of the population) and the not even yet 40 years of Democracy (we had a dictatorship and the monarchy was only abolished as ruling class in 1910) most people don't even talk/write/speak correctly. Plus, yeah, we have those fucked up situations with orthographic agreements being in the shelf for 20 years...

If the band prints their album and/or song titles all in caps on their cover art and inserts, or all in lowercase, ignore this and use the language's grammar rules of capitalization;

If the band uses otherwise "improper" capitalization (perhaps due to ignorance, or simply for aesthetical reasons, such as Fiers et Victorieux here -- proper French capitalization would be "Fiers et victorieux"), leave it as is. (Some mods disagree with me on this, and think proper grammar should always be used regardless of how bands print their titles, so feel free to debate this point.)

I agree with the first point, but as for the second; to me it would make the most sense to follow the same guidelines in both song titles and album titles, no matter how the band prefers to print them. What if the release has no covers available (for example some old rarity)? What if it's initially spelled "This is Our First Album" and on the re-release "This Is Our First Album" or if the capitalization differs between their website/album cover/wherever? All hell would break loose with people switching it back and forth over time. "This is Our Single" (by what you see on the cover) including one track which would be correctly capitalized as "This Is Our Single" would also be an odd solution to me.

Sciera wrote:

Spelling of band names and album titles - should stay the way a band does it.Capitalization of band names and album titles - will be changed to our standards.

I know it's been a while, but anyone know the rules of Greek? Rateyourmusic seems to not even have it, and this doesn't touch on it too much. I want to assume it's like a lot of European languages where the first word and proper nouns are the only things capitalized though.

_________________last.fm - Feel free to add, just let me know who you are first

Nah. Then you'll get too many people like me putting in requests asking it to be changed. When I submitted Poisoned By Life I made sure that the capitalization was done the same way it is on the albums because I felt it left a stronger impression. I also made sure the lyrics were formatted a certain way. Within a few days someone went in and changed everything. I had to submit a mistake and have a mod re-organize all of it. That's a lot of wasted time on everyone's behalf.

_________________You went on without meaning, an everlasting strife.It wasn't lust or alcohol, you were Poisoned By Life.

Band's name - Vergos Dî NoctisI suspect "Dî" is a preposition and should not be capitalized, though I don't know what language it is, any ideas?

A quick Googling session seems to reveal that it's most likely Sicillian. If I had to guess off the top of my head, I'd imagine the capitalization rules are similar to other Romance languages like Spanish and French.

EDIT: Hmm, but it seems like the only language that actually has "dî" marked as a word in Wiktionary is Friulian, where it's a form of "to say". I found a single use of it in a Sicillian article, but in general their word for "of" seems to be "di" instead. I'm not sure.

_________________

Wilytank wrote:

Aeosphorus wrote:

there are post-black metal bands such as ...Sunn O.

When did we start calling Sunn O))) black metal and how soon can we stop?

Yeah, I don't think it's Friulian. Would be an odd choice. It seems to have the circumflex accent for "i", but apart from the noun endings (if they are nouns, perhaps plural markers, at least contemporary Friulian apparently doesn't have case declension for nouns) that's about the only connection I can find. One would think that (Romance) Lorrain is more likely, considering their location, but who knows. What I could find through a quick Google search on that language doesn't even list "î" as a character in the writing system.

In any case, it seems likely that it's Romance of some kind and a preposition. Or perhaps it's just something they made up or frankenstein'd from other languages.

Oh, there's also Jose Del Rio, but apart from capitalization that's an acute accents case - the name of the musician is José L. del Río and I'm not sure if it should also be applied to the band's name or not...

I don't know if my comment is needed, but Greek letter capitalization is like French, which means that only the first letter should be capitalized, except for locations or names. If we follow the same rules, then this album (http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/So ... %B5/433186) should have been written like this:

These are examples of bibliography as used in scientific papers (with the words in italics being the book's/article's title, as done in English). This article, also, verifies my sayings: http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Language/GreekHope this helps.

Please, let me know if you want any help with Greek titles, I know accents can be a pain in the ass for non Greeks.